Simon

by Alexander Masters

The very same day that Israel finally declared independence as a refuge for the most persecuted race on earth, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq launched a combined attack, which the Secretary of the Arab League declared on Cairo radio was “a war of extermination, and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”

  “Murder the Jews! Murder them all!” shrieked the leading Islamic scholar of Jerusalem.

  Sixty years later, a man in London offered a million pounds to any breeding Iraqi Jewish couple who would go out to Baghdad to repopulate the city. “I have a friend who’s interested,” I enthused to Simon. “What do you think? Her name’s Samantha.”

  “I dislike the name Samantha, so anyone with that name would be unlikely to attract me. Maybe it’s because it makes me think of Samantha Fox, the pornography star…I may say, I do have a relation with a Samantha. She deals with my tax affairs.”

  Simon settled into a dead-eyed stare, gave himself a hug with his elbows and went back to looking out of the window: a quiet, euphoric gesture. Until we were on the train, he could devote his entire attention to ignoring me.

  Higher up Simon’s genealogical poster, closer to the rustle of the Old Testament, the children are nameless, lives are replaced by question marks, but deaths are biblical: a sister to Habebah, “drowned in the Euphrates”; Sassoon Aslan, “buried in Basra”; Minahem Aslan, “childless, in Jerusalem.” Before that, Simon’s family disappears off the top of the page into the Mesopotamian sand dunes.

  At the train station, Simon jolted off the bus to the fast ticket machine in the concourse and pressed screen after screen of glowing virtual buttons. Once he’d finally amassed all our possible discounts, off-peak fares and unexpected mid-journey changes to thwart the local train operators’ pricing structures, he stared for a minute at the screen, which was demanding to know how many passengers apart from himself were taking the trip.

  “0” pressed Simon, and looked up at me without crossness or dismissal.

  * * *

  Together, Aslan and Kitty Manasseh had five children, spaced every two years: Maurice, whose wife sneaked off one day when he was out and had herself sterilized; Nina, an old maid; Lilian, who ended up “in Blanchard’s antiques shop”…

  (“Do you mean she was for sale, Simon?”

  “No! Of course not, he, he he.”)

  …in Winchester, childless; Helene, Simon’s mother (Gaia among women in that barren setting, because she had three boys); and Violet, a war widow, who added another boy. This man, Simon’s first cousin, goes by the name of David Battleaxe.

  “You mean he was christened that?” I perked up.

  “Not christened, although we do celebrate Christmas. He’s Jewish. We’re all Jewish,” replied Simon. We were on the train now, hurrying down the aisle.

  “David Battleaxe…?”

  “After a racehorse.”

  “A racehorse?” I puffed.

  “In Calcutta.”

  “In Calcutta?”

  “One of my grandfather’s,” said Simon, then lunged left and landed with a thump in a window seat, his bag arriving on his lap—crucccnchch—a split second after.

  “So you do know something about your grandfather,” I observed, squeezing past two beer cans into the rear-facing seat opposite, next to the toilet. “He kept racehorses and named his grandson after a stallion. Yet when I asked you what your grandfather did just now, you said you didn’t know.”

  “You asked me what he traded, and I said I didn’t remember.”

  The train pulled away, clacked across various points until it found the London tracks, and mumbled past the Cityboy apartments with tin-can Juliet balconies.

  “I don’t think he did trade horses,” resumed Simon, as we picked up speed toward the Gog Magog hills. “Therefore I did not feel that it was relevant to provide that as an answer.”

  A conductor hurried up to us, clicking his puncher, jutting his chin across seat columns, and demanded tickets and railcards.

  Simon had his wallet already prepared, bunched in his fist, and offered up his pass and all the other necessary pieces of colored cardboard in a derangement of eagerness. So many, the conductor needed an extra hand to deal with it all: the outward from Cambridge to Wimbledon via Clapham Junction and Willesden Junction covered by one set of reduced-fare permits; a continued discount outward from Wimbledon to Woking, with “appropriate alternative documentation.” As the man sifted through these triumphs of cunning, Simon’s face was suffused with expectation. The conductor adopted a bored expression and punched whatever suited him with a machine that pinched the paper hard and left behind purple bumps. Simon snatched the pile back and studied the undulations with satisfaction.

  Another cousin I’d noticed on the family tree was called “Bonewit.” This woman appears on the fecund side of the family. It’s difficult to count the tiny layers of type on that half of the poster: seven children to Joseph and Regina; eight to Isaac Shellim and Ammam; ten—no, twelve—wait, my finger’s too fat for the tiny letters, eleven—to Shima and Manasseh: Aaron, Hababah, Ezekiel, Benjamin, David, Hannah, Esther…a rat-a-tat from the Pentateuch. Fifteen kids! to Sarah and Moses David. By the time they got to Gretha Bonewit, their seed was worn out.

  “Bonewit?” said Simon, interrupting. “‘Wit’ is Dutch for ‘white.’ I’ve got a Dutch dictionary in here.”

  As the train passed Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Simon’s attention swerved, to gout. Jolting his hand out of the foreign-dictionary sector of his duffel, he sank it back in six inches farther along and two inches to the right, and extracted a scrunched-up Tesco bag containing tablets. Allopurinol, for gout; Voltarol, for swelling (though it’s bad for his kidneys); Atenolol for blood thinning. He washed a selection down with more passionfruit juice and returned to dictionary hunting.

  “Simon, why have you got a Dutch dictionary?”

  “Why shouldn’t I have a Dutch dictionary?”

  “Do you have a Mongolian dictionary?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a dictionary for roast chickens?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, why a Dutch one?”

  Simon’s mother, grandfather Aslan (far right) and Battleaxe.

  “Because,” he honked, triumphant that the answer had got such assiduous courting, “I…” But at this point he found the book in question. “Let’s see, aaaah, hnnnn, bonewit, bone, bon…ooh…”—his eyes lit up—“…it means ‘ticket voucher.’”

  Simon will rot his floorboards with bathwater, immure his kitchen surfaces in Mr. Patak’s mixed pickle and hack his hair off with a kitchen knife, but he is never unkind to maps. Returning the dictionary, Simon burrowed a foot and a half to the left and cosseted out an Ordnance Survey “Landranger.” He shook it into a sail-sized billow of paper, then pressed it gently into manageable shape.

  Outside, the rain was frenzied. It clattered against the roof and ran in urgent, buffeted streaks along the glass. The flat lands of Cambridgeshire swelled up into a wave of hills.

  When I looked back at Simon, a banana had appeared in his hand.

  “Right, your granny. Why did she live in Woking but your grandfather stayed in Calcutta?”

  “I have no idea.” Simon looked up from his map and considered the point. “Isn’t that the sort of thing married couples do?”

  “Was there a huge argument?”

  “No, oh dear, I don’t know.”

  “Did he have a harem?”

  “Huuunh. Should he have?”

  Ordinarily, I like to record all interviews, because it’s not just the words that count but the hesitations and silences. But this opportunity had occurred without notice, and I didn’t have my voice recorder.

  I decided “Hnnn,” “Uuugh” and “Aaah” should be noted as “H ,” “U ” and “A .” Stage directions “pained,” “dead-eyed” and “yawning” to be added as appropriate.

  “OK. How about this: why did your ancestors leave
Iraq for Calcutta in the first place?”

  “Oh, dear, no. No, no,” Simon replied. “I can’t possibly remember that. A . How can I be expected to remember what happened before my birth?”

  Letter to grandparents, from Simon (signing himself by number 5) aged 5.

  In all of Simon’s recollections Kitty hobbles. After emigrating in the year he-doesn’t-know-when, leaving behind he-doesn’t-know-why her husband, Aslan, she bought a he-doesn’t-know-what-type-of-house in Woking with a bamboo plantation.

  “Bamboo?”

  Simon doesn’t-know-how—I mean, doesn’t know how—it got there. Every day, until her nineties, she dragged herself round, at first flicking gravel off the petunia bed with her walking stick; then, in her final stages of life, pruning the box-hedge parterre from her wheelchair, pushed by a daughter or a friendly guest.

  “One of her legs was broken,” is Simon’s explanation for the hobble.

  “Permanently?” I asked, and paused. “Which one?”

  Simon thought carefully. “H (pained), the left.” Then he considered the problem a moment longer: “A (aggravated), the right.”

  Another bout of concentration.

  “They alternated. Would you like some Bombay mix?”

  Letter to his mother, age 5.

  When she wasn’t in the garden, Kitty sat in the front room overlooking the croquet lawn and played bridge. Her entire last thirty years seem to have been wasted on hobbling and cards.

  Grandfather Aslan was “fairy-like.” Once every few years he appeared in London for a week, then disappeared. “Feeew-ff, just like that.” The rest of the time he remained in Calcutta, the very successful dealer in…Simon still-doesn’t-know-what.

  That’s it. There’s no point in prolonging this ancestral agony.

  *11

  Introducing

  Just as a square can be rotated through four turns to get it back to where it was to begin with, and the results laid out in a Group Table, the same approach can be applied to every regular shape. The size of the table you need to draw depends on how many operations have to be performed before you’ve exhausted all the possibilities and ended up back where you started. An equal-sided triangle can be manhandled three times before it’s back on its feet:

  As before, these represent the act of turning Triangle. The trick of the game is to find all the ways you can fiddle with Triangle and yet leave it looking just the same afterward as it did before you began:

  And (again as before, with Square) these turns combine in the most obvious way…

  In words, turn Triangle once, then turn it again, and the result is two turns: one plus one equals two. It is easy to spin Triangle head over high-heels, if that’s what you want:

  2 + 1 = 0

  (two turns, followed by one turn, returns Triangle to its original position)

  Remember, in Group Theory, turning a regular shape right round is taken to be the same as doing nothing at all. Full, completed turns don’t get totted up. It’s only the overall adjustment that matters:

  2 + 2 = 1

  The corresponding table (which, as with Square, looks like a pint-sized sudoku table) is therefore:

  Once again, we’ve got through a mathematical section with a suspicious lack of awfulness, like someone who’s committed a crime in the woods.

  Is that all there is to it? Was that really mathematics?

  The mist in these woods is hushed. A distant leaf clatters among the branches like a falling pin.

  Let it be whispered: a saucy chapter is approaching.

  12

  I had a camera once. When I found it wasn’t working,

  I had a sigh of relief.

  Simon

  The name “Norton” is a fake. Simon’s paternal grandparents, from Germany, died before he was born—“No Nazis involved.” His paternal grandfather anglicized the name from Neuhofer— i.e., New Towner, usually turned into Newton—then fiddled the result to sound less desperate. The only thing we can say for certain about these people, Simon pronounces sententiously, “is that when the surname was being used in Germany, the one place the Neuhofers did not live was in any village called Neuhof.” Then he sits back and stares at me happily, waiting for understanding to dawn.

  The fact is, for all the interest Simon takes in his ancestors, you’d think he was bred in a flowerpot.

  The rest of that day’s gentle journey through the Southeast of England was taken up with Simon tracing our route on the Ordnance Survey map with his forefinger. He is extraordinarily bad at this. Invariably, he knows where we were ten minutes ago, or where we are about to be after the next level crossing; it’s where we are now that boggles him. He’s in a constant fret to find the spot. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he’ll succeed, look up, catch my attention and desperately point through the window at a “site of special historical interest” several seconds after it’s disappeared from view. Simon’s general attitude to the third dimension is wary and defiant. It is always playing tricks on him. Two and 196,883 dimensions are the ones Simon prefers. He can spend the afternoon in his bath with twenty-four dimensions and suffer no ill effects at all. But every time he attempts to locate a three-dimensional racecourse or a well-known housing estate that had once appeared in the New Scientist because it was built in the shape of a snowflake, a tall bush has got in the way, or the train is making an unexpected detour around a hill, or everything is pitch black because he’s actually in a tunnel.

  Between these annoyances, Simon devised games. “What is the minimum number of London Underground stations you have to go through to get all the letters of the alphabet?”

  This is an old one of his.

  “Now, let me see, H ,” I suggested, taking out my notebook and using appropriate Simon noises to help me along. “You take the Circle Line west from King’s Cross, which gets you, A , let’s see now, Baker Street, that’s a, b, c, e, g, i, k, n, o, r, s, t. Then take the Bakerloo Line to…”

  Simon doesn’t use his fingers or paper when he’s playing this type of memory trick. With exactly the same expression on his face that he has when analyzing calculations, he parades stations through his recollection, snipping off letters. When my attempt crashed into the buffers after the third station, he began again at King’s Cross: “Northern Line to…then change at…next the Jubilee Line to…U (yawning)… St. John’s Wood—fourteen stops in all.”

  The point about dimensions holds here too. The Tube is one of the few places Simon never gets disoriented, because under London there are no landmarks to miss. Down there, the third dimension is made up entirely of shiny colored tiles and adverts for Jack Daniel’s.

  Another game was “What’s the smallest portion of the map that’s got every letter of the alphabet in it? It was a visit to Cornwall that made me think of this one,” he said with pride.

  “There are lots of places with a ‘z’ in them down there. Ohhh, look, there! THERE!” Simon began stabbing at the window of our rail car. Flashed past on the other side: a break in the hedgerow. Beyond it, tarmac, the glint of metal, a slash of something red and fat. Then it was gone. Simon beamed with satisfaction. “Weybridge Station—there used to be a Bridge Club there,” he pronounced.

  It’s Simon’s belief that all children should have compulsory lessons in orienteering and how to use public transport, “so they can learn to enjoy the countryside before they reach driving age, and as a result never want to learn to drive.”

  There is another advantage to this plan for enforced education: the idea of representing something in different formats is a fundamental one in mathematics, so understanding how to read maps and bus timetables would also help children appreciate the concepts behind their algebra homework.

  The only other ancestral snippet I extracted was that every week of the year, on Friday, and also at Christmas, Simon’s father drove the family down to Woking in the Bentley to visit Kitty Hobbler. It is the one point about those days that remains distinct in Simon’s mind—not because of the
droning regularity of the trips but because, strapped in the backseat in a swirl of petrol fumes and his mother’s “particularly pungent” French cigarettes, “that’s when my dislike of cars began.” Cars are “smelly, they kill children, they destroy the planet.”

  “So do buses. Why pick on cars?”

  “Cars are worse. Cars corrode mankind. Incidentally, have I told you my method of remembering the names of the lanthanides?” The lanthanides are soft metals that burn in air, and appear as a row of chemical elements dangling off the bottom of the periodic table.

  “Loathsome Cars Produce Noxious Polluting Smelly Exhaust Gases: They Destroy Human Environments, Take Young Lives.”

  And for the actinides, another dangling row of metallic elements, this time radioactive:

  “Avoid These Perils. Use No Private Automobiles. Cars Bring Complete Enslavement For Mankind, Not Liberation!”

  Simon, aged two.

  “Now, about your grandparents…” I began, determined to return to biography.

  “Have you seen this?” Simon burst out.

  He dragged out a Philip’s atlas: ring-bound, supersize. The two most important books in Simon’s life are both atlases: the Atlas of Finite Groups, which made him famous throughout the world of Group Theory, and this grubby guide to the roads of Britain. Opening the cover, he flicked past a couple of pages. The paper, through his fingering, has acquired a dirty down.

  If his house were burning down, this Philip’s road atlas, says Simon, is the only thing he would run through the falling timber to retrieve.

  Each time Simon travels along a new route on a bus, he traces over the relevant line in this book with a pencil. The Midlands, Kent and the Lake District are coated in smudge. Scotland, with the exception of a few contrails of graphite around Edinburgh and Scrabster, is largely crisp and clear. Along inland borders, his squiggles tend to get lost because on Philip’s maps the county divisions are gray. The pages around Cambridge, submerged in carbon, have torn loose and flop about the middle of the book.